Drones, Sanctions
and the Prison Industrial Complex

By
Brian Terrell

April 24, 2013 "Information
Clearing House" -"War
Is A Crime"
- In
the final weeks of a six month prison sentence for protesting
remote control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air
Force Base in Missouri, I can only reflect on my time of
captivity in light of the crimes that brought me here. In these
ominous times, it is America’s officials and judges and not the
anarchists who exhibit the most flagrant contempt for the rule
of law and it is due to the malfeasance of these that I owe the
distinction of this sabbatical.

As I share
in the perspectives gained from residing in the federal prison
camp in Yankton, South Dakota, it is important to disclose that
as a political prisoner sent up on trumped misdemeanor charges
for a few months, my situation is not the same as my fellow
inmates! All nonviolent “offenders”, most by far are prisoners
of the war on drugs and most are serving sentences of many
years. I also try to avoid the temptation to exaggerate the
hardships and privations I’ve suffered here. Certainly, doing
time in a minimum security camp is easier time than in most
other kinds of jails. If basic necessities are barely met, they
are met. I am in good company and time is passing with little
drama and without fear. For me, these months have been more a
test of patience than of courage.

Still,
this is a hard place to be in many ways and it would be wrong to
minimize what people suffer here. Among these are the basic
humiliation of being numbered and then counted at intervals
through the day, frequent shakedowns, random frisks (stranger’s
fingers fumbling with a lacerated heart, Solzhenitsyn
remembered) and strip searches, separation from family and
friends, severely limited visits, intercepted mail and
interrupted phone calls, incessant noise and overcrowding, petty
rules arbitrarily enforced.

The regime
here is one of omnipresent and unrelieved bureaucracy. What I
am experiencing over a few months as inconvenience and minor
irritation, cumulative over years can amount to a crushing and
ruinous burden.

“A
concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy,”
wrote Czech novelist Milan Kundera. It is “a world in which
people live crammed together constantly, night and day.
Brutality and violence are secondary, and not the least
indispensible characteristics.”

At Yankton
and in camps and prisons like it, the federal government has
achieved the complete obliteration of privacy as the drug war
has increased America’s already bloated prison population
sevenfold over the last twenty years. No country locks up more
of its citizens for so long sentences as the United States and
it can be said, too, that the government is taking strides to
extend the obliteration of privacy to the general population.

What the
government has not been able to accomplish by locking up
suspected drug users and dealers by the thousands is any
reduction in addiction or in the sale and use of illegal drugs.
There is little doubt that jailing drug related “criminals”
causes more and not less drug use and crime and yet the
so-called criminal justice system is expending an increasingly
greater fortune in human and material resources on prisons,
contrary to the ends of public safety or rehabilitation.

Before he
retired, President Eisenhower warned of the emergence of a
self-perpetuating “military industrial complex” producing
weapons and provoking conflict for the sake of ensuring a market
for more weapons. Likewise, America is increasingly in the grip
of what some call a “prison industrial complex,” building and
filling prisons for the purpose of ensuring fodder for more
prisons.

The United
States government does not run its foreign policy on any more
enlightened or humane premise than it does its prisons.

The
refrain “we are creating enemies faster than we are killing (or
capturing) them” is a bit of truth that gets leaked to the media
occasionally in recent years. Sometimes the sentiment is voiced
by even the most senior military commanders and applied
variously to any of several strategies, including night raids in
Afghanistan, check points in Iraq, the prison at Guantánamo, and
drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan.

As with
prisons, United States military and diplomatic policies run
contrary to their stated objectives of peace and public safety
and yet they persist with little question. Prisons and the
military, America’s dominant institutions, exist not to bring
healing to domestic ills or relief for foreign threats but to
exacerbate and manipulate them for the profit of the wealthiest
few, at great cost and peril for the rest of us.

One of
many discouraging moments of the presidential campaign that
ended just before I surrendered to authorities here in November,
was in a debate where Mr. Obama stated that Americans need to
“decide for themselves” whose sanctions against Iran would be
“more crippling,” his or Mr. Romney’s. This was an obscene and
unacceptable choice.

Sanctions
are portrayed as a diplomatic alternative to war but in their
application can be as lethal, warfare by another name.
Sanctions that extend beyond trade in armaments to include
embargoes on food, medicine, educational materials, and other
necessities of life can constitute weapons of mass destruction
in themselves.

It is
often said that such comprehensive and indiscriminant sanctions
make prisons of the countries targeted with them. While the
regime of sanctions against inmates here at Yankton is less
severe than the brutal conditions I witnessed in Iraq in 1998 or
that the United States imposes on the people of Iran or Gaza (by
proxy), the comparison is apt. Sanctions and prisons are both
about imposing economic and social isolation and both can raise
levels of tension and fear when applied without conscience.

Meaningful
employment, decent housing, support of loved ones, education and
self-respect would be helpful responses to the scourge of
addiction and the crimes that ensue from it. Providing these
for people at risk would be a priority for a responsible society
but all these are robbed from inmates in federal prisons.
Threats of war and terrorism are provoked by sanctions and
invasions and can be countered only by addressing root causes.

“What
father,” Jesus asked, “would give a stone to a child who asks
for bread?” We know the answer and it is to our shame.

“The
choice is no longer between violence and non-violence,” said Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. As resources dwindle, the climate warms
and nuclear arms proliferate, even more clearly now than in
King’s time, “the choice is between non-violence and
non-existence.”

The
quality of life and the very existence of all of us depends on
the security and well being of each person, especially of those
we label criminal or enemy. The admonition from the Hebrew book
of Proverbs to give food to our enemies when they are hungry and
drink to them when they are thirsty, echoed in the Sermon on the
Mount and the universal Golden Rule to treat others as we would
be treated is no romantic, unobtainable dream. “Love is the
only solution” to the human predicament, said Dorothy Day. Love
in our time has become a hard, pragmatic, gritty requisite for
survival.

Brian Terrell, a Catholic Worker and Co-Coordinator of Voices
for Creative Nonviolence will be released from prison on May 24,
2013. After that he can be reached at
brian@vcnv.org.

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